


On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 5)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [114]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Culture Shock, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Marriage of Convenience, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, The Corps is Mother and Father, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 18:01:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14550252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: The fifth part of a comprehensive essay on marriage in the Corps.Who makes the arranged marriages? How does that happen?The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Psi Corps Arranged Marriages (Part 5)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Part 1 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14408412). Summary of Part 1: Arranged marriages in the Corps are not what you think, are not as common as you think, always involve consenting adults, and no one is _forced_ to marry or breed.

Part 2 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539404). Summary of Part 2: Policies of genetic matching in the Corps were developed, in a "big picture" sense, to help protect Earth from future Shadow invasion. Most telepaths don't know about this, however, and so to them, these practices exist as part of a century of tradition, culture, and values.

Part 3 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544210). Summary of Part 3: Arranged marriages started in the MRA, under Crawford. They began as yet another policy by which normals attempted to make telepaths into a separate, subservient caste.

Part 4 is [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14544645). Summary of Part 4: Vacit promoted and streamlined the arranged marriage/marriage approval system, and created the genealogy department, in order to promote telepath population growth and telepathic strength, and thus to protect Earth from the Shadows. This department can approve or deny marriages, but does not actually arrange them.

\-----

So who makes these marriage suggestions?

As I've said elsewhere, "the Corps is Mother and Father" doesn't mean "Big Bother is Watching You," but that all telepaths are a close-knit _family_. As telepaths say in the pledge, "we are all children of the Corps," but telepaths who are older and in positions of authority also act in a parental role to the young.

Teachers raise children. Psi Cops keep the peace. And elders look after younger members of the family, and sometimes suggest marriages.

No one gets some letter from up in Geneva saying "we've matched you with this random person." Telepath communities are very small, insular, and tight-knit. Generally, in a given city, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone else's business. (It's pretty damn hard to keep a secret in that community.) Elders in the community (teachers, supervisors, older people) will look at the younger, unmarried people and say, "ah, these two would make a good match!" and then ask the Corps if there's a genetic match as well. If there is, then they will recommend to those two young people, "Hey! Why don't you consider marriage?"

In Talia's case, this happened off-screen, but it can be inferred that her teachers saw that she and Matt were friends, asked the Corps about their genetic compatibility, and suggested marriage. They married quickly, which turned out to be a mistake. He became emotionally abusive to her. She got out. Then she started up a relationship with Jason Ironheart, her instructor. Talia was a P5, and Ironheart a P10, so even if they'd applied to marry, it's not clear this would have been approved. But they never applied for marriage, at least not that we know of. He volunteered for an experiment with Department Sigma, and left the Academy.

In Bester's case, the suggestion came from his supervisor, Assistant Director Babineau.

\-----

Deadly Relations, p. 176-177

          Al wasn't particularly surprised when Assistant Director Babineau called him into his office a few weeks later. If he had been both observant and honest with himself, he would never have doubted Erik's word. But over the years, Al had gained the knack of ignoring - no, not ignoring, but disregarding - the opinions of those around him when they concerned him. When he worried about what people thought of him, it invariably led to grief. He sought excellence, and that rubbed people the wrong way - people didn't want you to be excellent, they wanted you to be mediocre, to keep expectations low, and make life easier for them.

          This time, though, he should have been paying attention. The Corps could tolerate a lot in an officer if he was efficient - but it could not tolerate instability.

          He half expected that Babineau was going to announce a hearing to determine his fitness to serve. In his mind, he was already preparing his defense.

          But for today, at least, it was just Babineau, his diminutive form doll-like behind an overlarge desk.

          "Ah. Mr. Bester. If you would?" He gestured to a chair, which Al stiffly accommodated to.

          "Mr. Bester, I am a plainspoken man, and a busy one, so I'll come to the point, if you don't mind. Do you know Alisha Ross?"

          "Sir? Yes, sir, we've met."

          "What do you think of her?"

          "Think of her, sir?"

          "Did you find her attractive? Ugly? Interesting? Boring? Flaky?"

          "She is not unattractive, sir. I can't say whether I find her interesting or not - we've never really spoken, and I know very little about her."

          "Well, I'll tell you a bit. She's a P12, like yourself. Doesn't have the temperament for fieldwork, so she mostly does forensics, building psychological profiles, that sort of thing. She's a decent soccer player, twenty-four years old, single. Do I have to draw you a picture, Mr. Bester?"

          "I see," Al said, feeling more than a little disoriented. "She and I - we have a good genetic match?"

          "Very good. Mr. Bester, we've already spoken to Ms. Ross. She's agreed, in principle, to consider a match."

          "And you want me to..."

          "First you should meet, I should think. Talk about it. But quite honestly, Mr. Bester, there are many who think marriage would be good for you at this time. If it isn't hate at first sight, the Corps is much in favor of a union between you and Ms. Ross. Such thorough genetic compatibility is actually quite rare."

          "Yes, sir. I would be happy to meet Ms. Ross."

          "You're a credit to the Corps, Mr. Bester. I expected nothing less from you."

\-----

As background to this, Bester has been mentally unstable since the Black Fox Raid. He endured such trauma that he psychosomatically lost use of his left hand, but refused to consent to a recommended psychiatric scan that could help find and resolve the issue. He's been volunteering for deathbed scans, risking his life each time, and leaving him in seemingly worse emotional shape each time. He's been suffering from flashbacks, nightmares, and insomnia. The mental health evaluators in the Corps have been asking his friends and colleagues about him. And yes, while they're worried about him as an _officer_ , they are also worried about him as a _person,_ and in Erik's case, as a _friend_ , something he can't understand because 1. he's a loner by personality anyway, and 2. trauma. People with PTSD have a lot of trouble trusting others.

So the elders around him - in this case, _an assistant director_ \- suggested a marriage, to help his mental health. Alisha, though recently having been in relationship herself, may not have been permitted to marry her lover (they are lower genetic matches). Either way, she respects and even admires Bester as a person, and so she agrees to marry him. Not out of "pity," as he interprets it, but to help him and to help the Corps. (And then she's unfaithful and messes this all up. She should have been more honest with herself and the Corps before agreeing to this, that even though she _wanted_ to help, she wasn't the right person for this. But she lied to herself about her feelings for Jared. She also lied to Bester when she told him she wasn't in love with anyone else - Bester at least told her that he'd once been in love with someone else, long ago, in his youth. But that had been when he was eighteen, nineteen by telepath age reckoning -  _fourteen years prior_ \- while she and Jared had been lovers recently.)

Babineau didn't know Alisha would be unfaithful. She seemed genuinely committed to it. (She lied to everyone, including herself, genuinely believing that her feelings for Jared didn't matter if the Corps found a good match for her.)

The point is, the people around Bester suggested the marriage because _they cared_ , even though Bester couldn't emotionally understand it through his trauma. Natasha Alexander went to bat for him, soon after his injury. She cut him slack no one else would, because she knew Director Vacit had been especially fond of him for some reason. Bester's friend Erik went to bat for him, to try to keep him in his job and out of a psychiatric treatment facility. (Erik went to great lengths for him, even though he pushed Erik away - this is itself a long story that  _Behind the Gloves_ comes back to later.) Assistant Director Babineau didn't want to pull his badge, either, not just because Bester was an excellent Psi Cop, but because _he cared_.

All of this is in there, but it's easy to miss since the story is from Bester's point of view, and he's Pushing Everyone Away. And then Alisha cheats on him and he pushes her away, too, and doesn't have any other relationships until he meets Caroline _thirty-five years later_.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - by telling the story from Bester's point of view, and offering readers no other insight into life in the Corps, the book _seriously_ skews the presentation of telepath culture. It's highly cooperative, very tightly-knit, and very insular. Yes, people stick their noses into "each other's" business (by normal cultural standards), which can be a huge point of culture shock to laters, and to outsiders trying to understand it, but it also means that _people look out for each other_. Telepaths treat each other as a close-knit family, and if someone needs something, the people around them try to provide it. (Bester is  _grateful_ to the Corps for seeing what he needed - a wife - and providing that, at least till Alisha messes it all up by behaving  _selfishly_.)

Elders and those with authority in the Corps look after younger people, as well as after the Corps as a whole. Bester just personally has a lot of trouble fitting into that system, socially, because he's such a loner, and always has been, since he was a small child. (He's making life hard for people not because he's striving for excellence over mediocrity, but because, as he says himself, he disregards what other people think of him. "I don't give a shit what people think of me, I just want to be the best" is _not_ Corps values. They're tolerating his attitude because he's good at his job. And even though he sometimes treats the people around him like crap, _they still care_. Telepaths are a family.)

Arranged marriages, even the genetic matching piece, are part of the same tight-knit familial culture. They're _suggestions_. Like all marriages (and other relationships), they sometimes work out, and sometimes don't.


End file.
